Terry Hermsen is a poet from Ohio, who has published four books of poems, all with Bottom Dog Press, under the editorship of Larry Smith: 36 Spokes: The Bicycle Poems (1985), Child Aloft in Ohio Theatre (1995), The River’s Daughter (2009—co-recipient of the Ohio Poet of the Year Award), and A House for Last Year’s Summer (2017). He conducted over 50 poetry residencies for the Ohio Art Council’s Artists in the Schools program, from 1979 – 2003, and has since taught poetry, art criticism and environmental literature at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio.

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His book on teaching poetry is called Poetry of Place: Helping Students Write Their Worlds (NCTE 2009). He was part of Reading The Earth: The Language of Nature workshops at Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education Center from 1999 – 2012 and has translated two books of Christian Formoso, a contemporary Chilean poet: The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile (2015)and bellezamericana (2021). Since 2017, he has concentrated his efforts on organizing climate change projects in central Ohio via ROAR (Regional Ohio Action for Resilience), which seeks to build cooperative bridges between area colleges, cities and citizenry to reduce our carbon footprint and build more supportive, ecologically-aware communities as a part of bioregional regeneration and connection.